Read The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War for Free Online

been trying to force him out. Then the North Koreans moved south, and overnight the people who ran the Army decided they wanted him to stay on.
    So instead of mustering out at Fort Devens in late June, he became a charter member of the 3/8. Richardson remembered that immediately after the North Korean invasion, on June 26 or 27, Johnny Johnson had assembled the whole battalion at a post movie house, and the unit was so small that only the first two or three rows were filled. They were shown an infantry propaganda movie that ended with some soldiers being awarded Silver Stars and Bronze Stars. Johnson had told them, “Men, those of you who aren’t wearing one of those will be in a few weeks.” Richardson had thought he was crazy atthe time. Within days men started arriving from every kind of outfit; MPs and cooks and supply men, all infantrymen now, enough to fill any movie theater. Then they shipped out.
    Later, after they were hit by the Chinese, Richardson believed that Johnson had been trying to warn him of his concern that the Chinese were in the area and that the approaches to the Eighth Cav were open. Perhaps it was as much of a warning as you could give at a moment when to utter the magic word “Chinese” to an NCO might trigger panic. If Johnson had still been their battalion commander, Richardson was sure, he would have tightened up their positions, moved them to higher ground, and made sure that their firepower was mutually supportive and much more concentrated. Ormond might become a fine officer someday, Richardson thought, but this was neither the time nor the place to make your combat debut.
    Major Filmore McAbee, the S-3, or operations chief, of the Third Battalion, like Johnny Johnson, was uneasy with the way the regiment was dispersed, but he would not get a chance to discuss it with Johnson for a long time, because he spent the next two and a half years in a prison camp. McAbee, an experienced combat officer from World War II, had been a company commander with the First Cav from the moment it arrived in country. He was considered an excellent combat leader, but at the moment the Chinese struck he was mainly a frustrated officer. Both Ormond and his exec, Major Veale Moriarty, were new in command, and their experience, as far as McAbee could tell, was primarily as staff men at the regimental level. They knew each other well and left McAbee, the more combat-tested officer, feeling crowded out. “I was the uneasy one, but I was the outsider,” he would later say. He had tried to alert Ormond about the battalion’s poor positioning, to no avail. Nor did he like the mood of the unit, and he blamed that on the senior officers: too many of the men were becoming far too careless and cocky. There was too much talk about where they were going after Korea. All they talked about was their next two stops—the Yalu and then home. Later, when McAbee found out that some Chinese prisoners had been captured and units like his, up on point, had not been warned, he felt that the decision at headquarters to conceal, if not suppress, this information was one of the most appalling acts he had ever heard of—a complete abdication of military responsibility. After he came to learn much more about Chinese military tactics, it struck him that his regiment, spread out as it was, had presented a particularly enticing target.
     
     
    WHAT NONE OF them, including Ormond, knew was that, before the Chinese hit, a debate was under way at higher headquarters. The commander of the Eighth Cavalry Regiment, Colonel Hal Edson, wanted to move his troops back. His unit was too exposed, he believed—and there had been enough warningsby then to make a man pay attention. On November 1, when he woke up, the skies were thick with smoke from forest fires. Edson and others suspected that the fires were set by enemy troops eager to shield their movements from American air observation. Major General Hap Gay, the First Cav Division commander, who